Efforts to construct a comprehensive legal concept of money have been unsuccessful, as existing descriptive conceptual analyses, whether drawing on economic theory, treating fiat money as the paradigmatic instance, or defining money as an institutional fact created by constitutive rules, have failed to provide sufficiently general understanding of money or effectively address practical dilemmas. This study adopts a conceptual amelioration approach informed by semantic externalism to refine the legal concept of money by identifying flawed beliefs embedded within the concept and refining it in epistemic and semantic terms to improve social coordination and legal coherence. Shifting the focus from a descriptive inquiry into what money is to a normative project concerned with what money should be, this research advances three core propositions. First, it seeks to enhance the understanding of the normative dimensions of fiat money. Second, it reconstructs the legal concept of money through a constructive interpretation rooted in integrity. Third, it encourages openness to alternative perspectives in conceptual engineering, including reference shift and departures from established paradigms where necessary.
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